\ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 441 058 



ADDRESS 



—OF THE— 



Hon. John Sharp Williams, 



-TO- 



Company "A; Confederate Veterans, 



—AT THE— 



Lyceum Theater, Memphis, Tennessee, 
May 31st, 1904. 



Presented to You with the Compliments of R. B. SNOWDEN. 



h 



f 



ADDRESS 



—OF THE— 



Hon. John Sharp Williams, 



-TO- 



Company "A," Confederate Veterans, 



—AT THE- 



Lyceum Theater, iMemphis, Tennessee, 
May 31st, 1904. 



Presented to You with the Compliments of R. B. SNOWDEN. 



PAUL t DOUGLASS CO., PRINTERS, 
MEMPHIS. 






\ 



y s(,i, 



-i-y 



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ADDRESS. 



Mr. Williams, after being introduced in a few well- 
chosen words, spoke as follows : 

One of the Ten Commandments delivered by Jehovah to 
Moses on Sinai, and not the least of the ten, is this : "Honor 
thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the 
land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Like all the other 
commandments of God to his children, this applies not only 
to the individual man, but to men in the aggregate — men in 
organized societies forming governments, constituting peoples. 
Just as the boy who does not honor his father and mother is 
apt to bring his own life to an untimely end, as a consequence 
of experimenting in new and foolish paths to the neglect of the 
advice, accumulated experience and teaching of those who 
have seen the world before him, so a people who forget the 
history, despise the traditions, ignore the ideals and fail to 
share the aspirations of their ancestry are a people not apt 
to conserve anything — neither their own power nor great- 
ness, nor their very living in the land itself, "which the Lord 
their God has given them." Just as a man cannot safely ig- 
nore his heredity and environment, so no people can consist- 
ently, with the hope of a long life as a people, neglect either, 
and the life of those people who do not honor their ancestry, 
revere their teachings and traditions, share their aspirations 
and ideals, is apt to be a short one. It cannot be long before 
they lose their identity in "the land which the Lord their 
God hath given them." 

We hear much about a "New South." There is no New 
South. What there is of change is a change in the direction 
of the energies of the people, and if there be anything great 
and good in the so-called New South, as far as I have been 
able to ascertain, it is always something whose growth has 
it» roots in the soil of the Old South. Everything admirable 



4 

in the so-called New South is built upon the old, as a house 
is builded upon the rock of its foundation. It could not be 
otherwise. No tree in the forest which has its roots only in 
the surface soil can expand and grow until it raises its head 
above the heads of its fellows to catch the sunlight. The 
plant with its roots in the surface soil only is a sickly, un- 
healthy, short-lived plant. It cannot in the very nature of 
things rise to a lofty altitude or send out great broad branches 
lo bear abundant and healthy fruit. Thus it is with a people. 
In order to bear abundantly of the fruits of a healthful civil- 
ization, there must be great roots that go down into the 
historic soil of the past to the very bed-rocks themselves. The 
glory of the present is always built upon the achievements of 
the past. We hear much of letting the "dead past bury its 
dead." No poet who was a philosopher, and perhaps no real 
poet, would ever have uttered that sentence. There is no 
such thing as a dead past. Every past,. though hidden, like 
the root of the tree, is alive and is supplying nutrition to sup- 
port and nurture and mature the fruit of the present. That 
there are things in the past which feed nothing in the present, 
just as there are elements in the subsoil which give nothing 
to the tree, is true. But there must be something in the sub- 
soil to furnish nutriment and in the same way an utterly dead 
past would not only not have strength enough to bury itself, 
but wfould have death enough to corrupt and starve and ulti- 
mately let bury itself the present too. If by letting the dead 
past bury its dead, you mean to bury its animosities, its an- 
tagonisms, its hatreds, its discords, its despair, then we can 
all say. aye! We could say, aye. were that appeal addressed 
to any people in any country at any period, but if you mean 
to bury its history, to bury its memories of "great men greatly 
falling with a falling State," its memories of heroism, un- 
daunted courage, superb fortitude, high endeavor and noble 
daring, if vou mean to bury the principles which actuated 
men to prefer death for their country rather than a life of 
ignoble ease for themselves alone, then we answer, no ! Eter- 
nally and forever, no! And we add, moreover, with all defer- 
ence, that you have said a silly and a dastardly thing. 

Ladies and gentlemen, thirty-nine years ago there oc- 
curred near the little village of Appomattox, in the State of 



5 

Virginia, one of the most memorable and pathetic scenes in 
all history. A few ragged and half-starved men were surren- 
dered and with them there was seemingly surrendered a cause 
for which they had fought for four years. This seeming 
made it sadder. It is useless to picture the scene ; Lee for 
the first time for many months in bright new uniform, with 
new sword ; Grant, rough from the field, with his officers about 
him ; the few brief words spoken around the table, where the 
terms were agreed to ; the silence and sadness which pervaded 
the minds and marked the conduct even of the Federal ofifi- 
cers and men ; the scene a few minutes later when the Confed- 
erate Chieftain was among his men ; the tears coursing down 
rugged cheeks that had perhaps never felt them before ; men 
returning with no vision of hope to cheer them to lives of 
hardship and of labor ; a despairing people and a desolate 
land. It is useless to picture all this, I say, because the imag- 
ination of each old veteran here pictures it all for himself and 
every child has heard it told so often that it presents itself 
in vivid coloring even to his mind. This marked really the 
war-close of a great struggle, and when we gather, as we 
yearly do, upon the anniversary month of that event, on our 
decoration day, the celebration, in its beauty and in its sad- 
ness, is a fitting one. 

The spring may well be called the childhood of the year, 
as childhood may well be called the spring-time of life. The 
spring-time is the season of resurrection, when all nature, 
seemingly dead, is renewed and renovated. It is fitting, 
therefore, that, in the resurrection period of the year, budding 
roses, themselves the symbols of new birth, shall be placed 
in the hands of little children, symbolizing perpetuation from 
generation to generation, to be borne to our cemeteries and 
laid upon the graves of the men of the sixties to symbolize 
the resurrection in our hearts, and the carrying forward into 
our children's lives and our children's children's lives 
of the sweet and brave memories of the men whose 
graves are bedecked, and ^vl^ose cause is remem- 
bered. But in everything which rational men do, in which 
there is either beauty or pathos, there must also be a reason. 
What is it then which we celebrate on an occasion like this? 
Is it mere physical courage? If it were, the world in all of 



its history could not find a physical courage superior to that 
of the men who died or surrendered under Lee, Jackson and 
the Johnstons. But mere physical courage is a thing too com- 
mon amongst the men of the rate to which we belong, to be 
worthy of any sort of celebration for its own sake. Mere 
fighting is no virtue ; far from it. Indeed, the man who is 
not great enough and brave enough not to fight when he 
ought not to, is a poor excuse for a man. Speaking for my- 
self, I have no admiration of the professional fighter, whether 
he be a Texas cowboy or a West Point graduate. Nor have 
I any admiration for the mere soldier, the professional sol- 
dier — the $i3-a-month fighter, who "for pay and provant" 
dedicates his life to the business of fighting — ignorant before- 
hand and regardless of the cause for which he shall be called 
upon to fight. The very thing which makes a magnificent 
professional soldier makes a poor citizen ; namely, the habit 
of implicit obedience — a soldier's only duty is obedience; a 
citizen's chief duty is to criticise, to think and to question. 
Physical courage in and of itself is like wealth or like knowl- 
edge — it is a trust — and it depends upon how its possessor 
uses it whether it shall be classed with the virtues or the 
vices, with the good or with the evil things of this world. 
When it is thrown upon the side of right in response to the 
call of duty, it is worthy of your praise and your reverence. 
When it is thrown upon the side of wrong at the call of power, 
it is damnable and damning. I have said that the professional 
fighting man, the professional soldier, does not, to my mind, 
express the highest type of manhood. No matter how bright 
the uniform, how loud "the shouting of the captains,'' how 
si)lendid the deeds of valor, how inspiring the clangor of the 
fife and the drums, there is nothing more school-boyish, noth- 
ing more disgusting, nothing more detestable, and nothing 
in the history of the world has been so dangerous or so de- 
structive as the puerile thirst for military fame and the school- 
boy love for "glory" and a strenuous life. But, although this 
is true, there is a soldier who docs fill the very highest possi- 
ble measure of manhood. It is the soldier who has become 
one, not because he loves fighting, or is indifferent to blood- 
shed, not because he is silly enough to think that fame and 
glory, in the true sense, can proceed from mere warlike en- 
counter, but who has become one from a sense of duty, espous- 



7 
ing a soldier's life as an evil, but an evil less than that which 
would come upon himself and his children, as a result of slav- 
ish submission to wrong, who has become a soldier for the 
protection of individual liberty, for the protection of individ- 
ual or community life and the right of free and untrammeled 
pursuit of happiness in one's own way, or for the defense of 
the national territory, or for the protection of that which is 
higher than all mere happiness or life — the civilization of his 
race — which is the fruit and the flower of the life of his race. 
Such soldiers were they who turned back the tide of Asiatic 
conquest at Marathon, who died unavailingly at Thermopylae 
in trying to turn it back ; who returned with palm leaves, 
victorious, singing paeans, from the sea fight at Salamis. Such 
were they who, under Charles Martell, upon the broad plains 
of France, drove back the advancing hosts of Maho'metanism, 
and secured for all time to Europe and Europeans and their 
descendants, in the Old World and in this, the precious possi- 
bility of the civilization of the Christian and the white man. 
Such were they who, in the cause of individual and civil lib- 
erty, met King John at Runnymede. Such were they who 
followed Wolfe to the heights of Abraham in order to secure 
an undivided North America to peace and to the law and lan- 
guage and literature and the civilization of the English speak- 
ing race. Such were they who, under the Virginians, Wash- 
ington, Lee and Morgan, and under the Carolinians. Marion 
and Sumter, and under the Tennesseans, Sevier and Shelby, 
threw back the rising tide of British imperialism, while they 
asserted the inherent and inherited right of Englishmen, 
whether at home or in the Colonies, to be governed by laws 
of their own making, promulgated by a government existing 
by their own consent; and such must have been, my friends, 
the soldiers of the Confederacy, if anything which they did 
is worthy of our celebration in these beautiful May days of 
the recurring years, in the sweet Southland. If it is not mere 
physical courage, then what is it which we celebrate? Why 
do we meet? What is the sense of our coming together? Is 
it to keep alive the memory of a lost cause? Is it the "Lost 
Cause" which we celebrate? Not a whit of it. Or, if it is, 
we have no cause to celebrate. In the economy of God, there 
are no lost causes in this world, except wrong causes. In 
everv cause which has ever existed, whether it has apparently 



8 

prevailed or apparently gone down, there have been some 
things — mere accompaniments, perhaps — which were wrong, 
but in every cause worthy of celebration there have been 
things which were not wrong but right, and which being eter- 
nally right, have not gone down as lost forever, though, per- 
haps, temporarily eclipsed. I am an optimist, and in a broad 
and permanent sense what Pope said is true : "Whatever 
is, is right." W'hatever comes, and comes to stay, is right; 
whatever goes, and goes to stay, is wrong. To believe other- 
wise would be to surrender the direction of the universe to 
anarchial forces rather than to believe them in the keeping 
of a Supreme Intelligence. 

We meet to celebrate the cause and the men of the six- 
ties. What was the cause? Was it secession? Not a whit 
of it. Secession was merely the remedy which was invoked 
for the assertion of a right, for the maintenance of a cause. 
It had been twice before virtually invoked in these United 
States, though the sword had not been drawn to support its 
invocation. Once by New Englanders, in opposition to what 
they considered the tyranny of the Embargo Laws, and once 
by the South Carolinians in denial of the constitutional right 
of a government of all the people to levy tribute upon all the 
people in order to make the capital of a part of the people 
more profitable, or the labor of a part of the people better 
compensated. W^ar determined that the remedy should fail, 
and I think we arc all agreed that it is well that the remedy 
failed. I think we are all ready to go forward, marching 
shoulder to shoulder, with an eye to the possibilities of the 
future, rejoicing in the lusty strength of a great and reunited 
people. What was the cause then? Was it slavery? Not 
a whit of it. Slavery was undoubtedly the occasion of the 
quarrel and of the fight, but had the South been attacked in 
any of her other property or civil rights, she would have de- 
fended them just as readily ; in fact, more readily than she 
did in this case. It was merely upon the side of slavery that 
our right to local self-government was attacked. We thought, 
and thought properly, that if the people of other communities 
in the Union could stamp under foot local self-government 
in the South for so-called moral reasons, even though the 
thing immediately attacked were slavery, we would have 
ceased to be a free people; that the Union would have ceased 



to be a union of free and equal communities — States — that 
we ourselves would cease to be free and independent and 
equal citizens and become the mere subjects of others. It 
must never be forgotten that the assertion of local self-gov- 
ernment carries with it, as a necessary evil, the risk of local 
self-misgovernment, and even had it been universally ad- 
mitted, as it was not, that slavery was a great moral wrong, 
no community could, with self-respect, admit the right of 
another community to prescribe for it what should and what 
should not be considered morally right or wrong. God had 
left that task to themselves. When one community says to 
another, you shall have the right of local self-government, 
"provided you govern right," "provided the things which 
your government does or establishes are morally right, and 
not wrong," then reduced to its last analysis this merely 
means, provided we think that you are right and not wrong, 
and this means an abolition of the right of local self-govern- 
ment ; for if I be free to govern myself, provided my walk and 
conduct meet the approval of some one else, I am not free 
at all, but a slave. Then the cause for which the South went 
to battle was first, though not chiefly, the right of local self- 
government. How sacred a right ; how ancient ! A right 
which our forefathers in the forests of Germany, or upon the 
downs of Devon, or from the beginning of their settlement 
in the wildernesses of America — from the beginning 
of the life of the race down to now — in every place 
which it has inhabited — considered sacred and inalienable — 
one of the inborn rights of a son of the race. It made no 
difference whether our self-government was, in the opinion 
of others, self-misgovernment or not. To admit their right 
even to sit in judgment upon that question was to admit our- 
selves bond and not free, subjects and not citizens, subordi- 
nates and not equals. 

But there was something else, and even a greater cause 
than local self-government, for which we fought. Local self- 
government temporarily destroyed may be recovered and 
ultimately retained. The other thing for which we fought is 
so complex in its composition, so delicate in its breath, so 
incomparable in its symmetry, that, being once destroyed, it 
is forever destroyed. This other thing for which we fought 
was the supremacy of the white man's civilization in the 



lO 

country which he proudly claimed his own ; "in the land which 
the Lord his God had given him ;" founded upon the white 
man's code of ethics, in sympathy with the white man's tra- 
ditions and ideals. Our forefathers of the forties and fifties 
and sixties believed that if slavery were abolished, vmless 
the black race were deported from the American States, there 
would result in the Southern States just such a condition of 
things as had resulted in San Domingo, in the other West 
India Islands, and in the so-called republics of Central and 
South America ; namely, a hybridization of races, a lowering 
of the ethical standard and a degredation, if not loss, of civ- 
ilization. Slavery has been abolished, and this result has 
not followed, but that does not destroy the fact that they 
had a right, from the lights before them, to think what they 
thought. It is only from the past that any generation of men 
may judge the future, and although the same cause may not 
always be followed by the same result, because of different 
conditions — history seldom literally repeats itself — yet when 
cause and environment are seemingly the same, when spec- 
ulating in advance of the result, it would be folly to predict 
a difiference. Slavery is lost, and it is certainly well for 
us and the, public — perhaps for the negro — that it has been 
lost. But the real cause for which our ancestors fought back 
of slavery, and deemed by them to be bound up in the main- 
tenance of slavery, to-wit : The supremacy of the white 
man's civilization, the supremacy of the ethical culture, 
which had been gradually built up through countless gener- 
ations, has not been lost. We have not had the experience 
of the countries to the south of us, but I ask you, my friends, 
in all soberness and candor, to ask yourselves how and why 
we escaped the evils which befell others from identical causes, 
under similar though not identical conditions? What pre- 
vented the Africanization of the South? We escaped, but 
those of you, even no older than I am, will remember by what 
a slender thread we held to safety. You will remember the 
ten long years of so-called reconstruction which made the 
four long years of war itself seem tolerable by comparison, 
the ten long years during every day and every night of 
which Southern womanhood was menaced and Southern man- 
hood humiliated. You will remember the long, long carnival 
of folly, the saturnalia of vice and corruption, during which 



II 

a black flood seemed all but to engulf ourselves as a race, 
our precious heritage from the past, our sweet and sacred 
hope for a future. All that had been conquered in the shape 
of comfort, wealth or culture from a slow-building and labo- 
rious past seemed lost. The brethren of our own race, in 
our own country — the country whose pen had been Jefferson, 
whose tongue had been Patrick Henry, and whose sword had 
been Washington — were against not only us, but the race 
itself — its past, its future — were seemingly bent only on two 
things — our humiliation as a race in the present, our subordi- 
nation as a race in the future. As sure as I am standing here, 
I, at any rate, believe that had society in the South been 
called upon to meet these conditions without the intervention 
of four years of war, been called upon to meet them with the 
friendly and patriarchial relations existing between the races, 
the result would not have been a result of bare escape, but 
would have been an engulfment. There is no grander, no 
more superb spectacle than that of the white men of the 
South standing from '65 to '74 and '75 quietly, determinedly, 
solidly, shoulder to shoulder in phalanx, as if the entire race 
were one man, unintimidated by defeat in war, unawed by 
adverse power, unbribed by patronage, unbought by the pros- 
pect of present material prosperity, waiting and hoping and 
praying for the opportunity which, in the providence of God, 
must come to overthrow the supremacy of "veneered sav- 
ages," superficially "Americanized Africans" — waiting to re- 
assert politically and socially the supremacy of the civiliza- 
tion of the English-speaking white race. But what gave 
them the capacity to do this sublime thing, to conceive it and 
to persevere in it to the end? To wait like hounds in the 
leash — impatient, yet obedient to the call of the huntsman's 
horn — which came upon the heels of the autumn elections in 
the Northwestern States in 1874? What gave this capacity 
to the easy-going, indolent, life-enjoying Southerner? What 
if not four years of discipline, training, hardship? Four years 
which taught the consciousness of strength and mutual cour- 
age, the consciousness of capacity for working together, the 
power and the desire of organization, and which gave them, 
with it all, a capacity for stern action when required by stern 
events. But for the war — the lessons which it taught, the 
discipline which it enforced, the capacity for racial organiza- 



12 

tion vvliich was born with it — I. for one, do not believe that 
conditions in Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi today 
would be very far different from what they are in Hayti, Cuba 
or Martinique. 

Is either of these causes a lost cause — either local self- 
government of Caucasian civilization? Why, no; ladies and 
gentlemen. There was never a time in the history of these 
United States when the cause of local self-government within 
the States upon the American continent, at any rate, wTiatever 
may be true of our so-called "appurtenant appendages," was 
stronger than it is today, and there never was, from the very 
beginning of our life as a nation down to this very moment, 
when the necessity and wisdom of the maintenance of the 
supremacy of the white man's civilization, his civil laws and 
his code of ethics, upon which that civilization is bottomed, 
was so universally and sincerely admitted as it is today. Why, 
the very men who told us in the sixties and the seventies that 
"one man was as good as another," no matter what the state 
of his civilization, no matter what his race traits and tenden- 
cies, are the very men who now, in establishing new gov- 
ernments in the new insular possessions, not only admit, 
but strenuously contend for the necessity of making such 
provisions of law as will prevent the white men in those pos- 
sessions from being ruled by other races. The act of Congress 
for the government of the Islands of Hawaii is almost iden- 
tically the Mississippi Constitution re-enacted and the reason 
for its passage was the same ; namely, to secure, as far as 
possible, without violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth 
Amendments, the white man's supremacy there, and this, too, 
although the native Kanakas in the Hawaiian Islands have 
a percentage of illiteracy less than that of any State in the 
Union except one, and although the white men in the Islands 
do not constitute one-fifth of the population. 

My friends, there is no other instance that I know of 
where men having apparently lost a cause by four years of 
fighting, subsequently preserved it by ten years of unterri- 
fied solidarity, superb patience and magnificent common sense. 
I believe the world knows about us now these two things: 
First, we have the strength of a giant ; and second, that we 
can be trusted not to use it like a giant — brutally and irra- 
tionally. So much for the cause of the sixties. How about 



13 

the men, and as men, in order to greatly carry on a great 
struggle must have great leaders, how about the leaders 
first? This race to which we belong — this race without a 
name — which we, with approximate accuracy, call the "Eng- 
lish-speaking race" — this great composite race of Saxons and 
Danes and Normans and Scotch and Irish and Welsh, low 
German and high German, and Celt — has, from the begin- 
ning of its history, had magnificent leaders. Upon the water, 
the Vikings, Frobisher and Drake, the men who swept the 
Spanish Main ; Nelson at the Nile and at Trafalgar; then John 
Paul Jones and Perry and Decatur. Upon the land such 
men as Richard the Lion-Hearted, leading where few dared 
to follow, over the hot sands of Palestine ; the Black Prmce 
at Creasy and Portier; Prince Hal at Agincourt; Cromwell 
and Prince Rupert, with their ironsides and gay cavaliers ; 
John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, Charles Mordaunt, 
Earl of Peterborough, Washington, Light Horse Harry Lee, 
Daniel Morgan, Nollichucky Jack and Isaac Shelby, Andrew 
Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Henry Lawrence at Lucknow, Gen- 
eral Nicholson at Delhi, have filled the ideal for those who 
love gentleness or courage, or both combined. The array 
of mere names would necessitate my speaking too long for 
the endurance of an audience. And yet, my friends, in com- 
parison with these glorious names of so many hundred years, 
there shall not pale in ineffectual light through all the ages the 
names which our Southern people gave to the world in that 
comparatively short war period. Think of them ! The edu- 
cated and talented soldier, Robert Edward Lee! That very 
born genius and thunderbolt of war, Stonewall Jackson ! 
Ashby, the peerless; and Pelham. the yoimg artillerist! He 
who died in the very beginning, and with whom probably 
died the Confederacy itself, Albert Sydney Johnston ! Ad- 
mirals Semmes and Buchanan ! Forrest, unaccountable and 
incalculable ! All these recur to your mind without the ne- 
cessity of mention. Never forget that Mississippi did not 
fail to furnish her quota — Barksdale and Harris, Humphries 
and Posey, Featherston and Griffin, Edward Gary Walthall. 
I do not mention all, for some are yet living, and the names 
of some who are dead do not rise to my lips. 

And yet, my friends, there are people who say that all 
this sort of talk is "sentiment;" that what we want to do is 



14 

to "'come down to cotton and corn and pork ;" buying and 
selling, negotiating bank exchange ; that everything else is 
"sentiment." and that sentiment is "rot." Let it be a point 
with all of you. and especially let it be a point with you, 
young boys and girls, to remember that the only thing in 
this world which is not "rot" is sentiment. That thing is 
rot which can last a man only a lifetime — which rusts and cor- 
rupts and decays — that thing, in other words, which can rot. 
Your cotton and produce are "rot ;" your bank exchange 
is "rot;" your talk about mere material prosperity, as the 
chief aim and object and existence of man, is "rot," because 
when you come to lie down and die and be placed within your 
narrow habitation, six or seven feet by three or four, not one 
of these things, nor things gained in this way, can you carry 
with you, nor present as a part of yourself at the 
chancel of God. They are well enough — w^e want 
them, and plenty of them — but they are of the 
earth earthy and exceedingly temporal. It is only your 
sentiments and the principles upon which they are based, as 
a house founded upon a rock, and the purposes, aspirations 
and ideals which grow out from them, as a tree does from 
its sub-soil roots, that you can carry with you, because they 
have become a part of your immortal souls. Just in propor- 
tion as they are high and lofty, on the one hand, or low and 
"mere monetary," on the other, are you fitted for the "com- 
munion of the saints," upon the one side, or that of hell-born 
creatures on the other. Business is all right. Money-mak- 
ing is all right. Every man should be diligent in business. 
We have apostolic authority for that. Every man should 
want to make money, in order that he may look all other men 
straight in the eye, with the independence of a true manhood, 
owing no man anything, saying with poor Bobbie Burns: 

"Not for to hide it in a hedge. 

Nor for train attendant; 
But for the glorious privilege 

Of being independent." 

But the man who surrenders his entire soul, or even sub- 
ordinates his nature, who prostitutes all of his energies, or 
his chief energies, to the business of piling one dollar upon 
another, who forgets that there are flowers and poetry, a past 



15 

and a present for himself and for his race, on earth and in 
Heaven, who has narrowed himself to the point where every- 
thing but money-making and so-called business has become 
"rot," would be bored to death in the kingdom of Heaven 
in twenty-four hours, and could have no worse punishment 
provided for him than an eternal sojourn in a purely moral 
and mental world. A country without memories is a coun- 
try without history, a country without history is a country 
without traditions, and a country without traditions is a coun- 
try without ideals and community aspirations, and a country 
without these is a country without sentiment, and a coun- 
try without sentiment is a country without capacity for 
achieving noble purposes, developing right manhood or tak- 
ing any truly great place in the history of the world. 

I have talked about your leaders, but, my friends, what 
makes leaders? Only this, loyal, faithful, devoted, trusting, 
thinking and not too querulous followers. The greatest lead- 
ers must have followers worthy of them, or the opportunity 
for leadership does not exist. 

I have mentioned some of the great leaders on land and 
at sea of the great army of the Confederacy. 

We have failed as yet to mention its crowning glory, 
which was the private soldier. 

Taken all in all, no body of private soldiers like that of 
the Confederacy has ever existed or fought under any leader- 
ship. They were equally great on the march ; on the defen- 
sive; on the attack, when the order to charge came; in prison, 
where "durance vile" and suffering for food on the one hand, 
and the temptation of offered freedom on the other, were 
equal inducements to desertion. I remember the Confed- 
erate soldier best of all when he was on the march. I can 
see him now winding his way through the dust, shoe-mouth 
deep, unwashed, unkempt, but jovial still. I can hear his 
voice as he passes the big gate: "Buddy, does your grandma 
know you are out?" "Sissy, who painted your lips so red?" 
No wonder that, with all the raiding and counter-raiding, 
passing and counter-passing of war, the boys of my age — 
nine, ten or eleven years — thought that the jolliest life in 
the world must be that of a soldier, and looked forward to 
the time when they might be permitted to participate in it; 



i6 

not as a day of great responsibility, inaugurating a life of 
much danger, but as a sort of holiday, when fun would be 
unending and jokes ever recurrent. 

There existed once a man by the name of Hannibal, later 
a Corsican. Napoleon Bonaparte by name; earlier another Ital- 
ian from Rome, of the genus Julius, surnamed Caesar; 
all of whom thought they knew something about the impor- 
tance of time in military operations, something about march- 
ing infantry, so as to be "at the point of crisis with the largest 
numbers first," but one Thomas Jonathan Jackson, surnamed 
"Stonewfall," because he could, when that was the thing 
to do, stand still like a stone wall, might, in this game of 
marching, have given either one of these World Captains an 
advantage of three out of five and beaten them to the goal ; and 
an unlettered man, guiltless of military training, untutored 
in the science of war, half West Tennessean and half North 
Mississippian, by name Bedford Forrest, could not only have 
taught them how to move cavalry quicker than they knew, 
but could have revolutionized for them, as he did for the 
modern world, the art of war by changing cavalry into 
"mounted infantry," with all the advantage of cavalry on 
the march, and all the advantage of infantry in the fight. In 
these regards, the Southern private soldier revolutionized the 
art of warfare. It w-as not long before he had done away 
with the useless encumbrances of haversacks, knapsacks and 
tents, leaving the non-essentials of warfare behind him, and 
carrying only the essentials with him ; namely, food, if it 
was convenient ; and a gun and ammunition, anyhow. One 
of the inexplicable things to me about the Southern soldier is 
this, that he seemed to have been, for the most part, w^ithout 
a sufficiency of anything in the world except guns and ammu- 
nition. He developed a capacity for starving and going naked 
marvelous and unparalleled, but somehow he seems never to 
have been without guns and ammunition, at least enough to 
start a battle on. 

I have said the Southern soldier was great on the march, 
but marching, after all, is only "getting there." After one 
gets there, one must do something. At the beginning of 
the war, those who thought they knew, said that the South- 
erner would show the elan and enthusiasm which had always 
characterized the Frenchman upon the charge, but that he 



17 

puld not show the steadfastness and perseverance in resist- 
aVce and capacity for standing punishment while acting upon 
tVt defensive, which had characterized the British soldier and 
Avlich our Northern brethren boasted they would demon- 
strate, and which, to do them justice, they did so frequently 
■denonstrate. Critics were right when they said the South- 
-ern^ would be great on the charge. The world has witnessed 
som» great charges in its day. Our white race has made 
■someof them ; the charge of the French cavalry at Austerlitz, 
(of Nipoleon's Old Guard at Waterloo; the perhaps equally 
great \counter-charge of the English Horse Guards at the 
same |lace ; the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, 
immortal in itself and rendered metrically immortal in the 
minds of men by Tennyson's stirring lines ; the unavailing 
charge of the English at the battle of New Orleans ; the 
«charge o\ the Mamelukes — white slaves, as they were — upon 
Napoleons squares in the shadow of the pyramids — all these 
recur to i^ie mind. But where, in all the history of all the 
charges, d\) you find- exploits comparable to that beginning 
at Savage $tation and continuing on through the seven days 
and ending at Malvern Hill ? To that of the Texans, when they 
told Lee to so to the rear, in the wilderness? To that suicidal, 
murderous a\id unavailing onslaught of the Confederate in- 
fantry upon the breastworks of Franklin? And above all, to 
that of Pickett and his men at Gettysburg? I can see them 
now ; the reluctantly obedient and sullen corps commander 
sitting upon the fence, Pickett saluting and asking, "General, 
shall I carry my men in?" Longstreet's bowing without a 
word. I can hear the Virginian giving his orders, see him 
in his place with head bowed, see the sweep of the line without 
a break, as it goes across and up the long slope, the orders 
almost noiselessly passed to close up as the artillery, and later 
the musketry, tear the ranks to pieces ; I can see the long 
slope from one end of that gray line to the other, in the course 
of its march by the dead and dying; I can see the few who 
attained the height vaulting, sword in hand, or with clubbed 
musket, into the enemy's entrenchment, I can see them look- 
ing about to find themselves surrounded by blue coated sol- 
diers — more than enough without arms to have tied them with 
pocket handkerchiefs. I can see those few — oh, so few — 
looking back over that long, long slope to find not one gray 



coat in sight for a support — Lee's orders not carried out. I 
see them then, despair of desperation settling upon then, 
some surrendered and some beginning to break back to tne 
Confederate line; I can hear later the anguished and agonizng 
reproach of Pickett, when he states to General Lee that his 
magtiificent division had been swept out of existence, aid I 
can hear Lee, with a greatness of soul, a magnanimity of 
which he alone was capable, saying: "Never mind, Geieral, 
it has all been my fault," and to the men, "you must hep me 
get out of this as best we can." In comparison witi this 
demonstration of the courage of the soldier and the Magna- 
nimity of the leader, what could you quote from all listory? 
But, my friends, if the critics were right about the elan of 
the Southerner on the charge, they were wrong about his 
capacity for standing punishment on the defense. Witness 
Jackson and his Virginians at First Manassas ; witness Stone- 
wall Jackson again with his division nearh' a vhole day 
waiting for Longstreet at Second Manassas ; witress South- 
ern resistance at the "bloody angle," and upon the reformed 
lines of entrenchment back of it at Spottsylvania ; witness 
Second Cold Harbor, where the Federal private soldier, of 
his own accord, refused to obey orders to charge again against 
the impregnable resistance of the Southerners. The dogged, 
patient, steadfast courage of Wellington and the British sol- 
diery at Torres Vedras, great as it was, pales meffectually in 
the light of the suffering, patience, steadfastness to the end, 
displayed by the soldiers of the Confederacy at Vicksburg and 
at Petersburg. What soldiers they were ! And bear in mind, 
my friends, that "soldiering" wbs not their business. They 
fought neither for love of it, nor for pride in a soldier's pro- 
fession, nor from the mere habit of soldierly obedience, nor 
for pay in money which was worthless, nor for "provant," 
which was little. Soldiering. I say, was not his business. 
He was a mechanic, a lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, sometimes 
even a preacher, as brave General Leonidas Polk and General 
Gregg, both Bishops, were. But when called upon to be- 
come, for the time being, for his country's sake, a soldier, he 
became such a soldier as that the world has never seen his 
like. It has been said that peace hath her victories no less 
than war, and in a certain sense it is true. But taking the 
exploits of a soldier like that, hazarding death only for his 



19 

;ountry's and posterity's sake — not his own — peace has no 
^■lories like his, for the simple reason that she furnishes 
i\ien with no opportunity so great; for, after all, the glory of 
a\man consists in this, that he demonstrates his love for his 
fellowmen, and how can it be that this demonstration can 
beymade more complete than by surrendering one's very life 
for\them ? 

\But if this Southerner were a great soldier, what m ide 
him BO? Theit must be some reason for it or else it canrjot 
be ttVie. What are the private soldiers of a volunteer a^mv? 
They are simply the plain people in uniform. The soldiers 
of the Confederacy were great then, because they were a great 
people, ladies and gentlemen, because they were a free and 
equal people, an ultra democratic people. Free, proud of 
their liberties, proud of their determination to maintain them ; 
equal, no man daring to assert, throughout all the Southern 
land, any inherited or acquired superiority over his fellows, 
except that given by character and knowledge, or else that 
bestowed by the free suffrage of his fellows. In the Confed- 
erate army there marched, shoulder to shoulder, men whose 
fathers owned their hvmdred negroes and their five thousand 
acres, and the sons of overseers or of poor yeomanry, who 
owned nothing except the croprs they made each year. The 
Confederate soldier, when off duty, if intimacy in private life 
justified it, as it nearly always did, called his Colonel "Henry," 
his Captain "Jim" or "Jack.' I have frequently heard men, 
up North especially, talking about "Southern aristocracy." 
Except in the early days upon the tide-water of Virginia and 
in the low? country of South Carolina, nobody in the South 
ever assumed to be an aristocrat, for if he did the balance 
"jes' laffed," and even in'those localities the assumption owed 
its birth to colonial conditions and died out, or was dying out, 
with them. Talking once, in the cloak-room at Washington 
to a gentleman from the North, who had said something about 
Southern aristocracy, I said : "It takes just two things to 
constitute an aristocrat down South ; one is to be white and 
the other is to be decent." Being white costs nothing — a 
man is born that way. Being decent is not expensive — water 
is cheap, all that is necessarily added is to be clean in thought 
and speech, as well as in person. Thus, we can all be Southern 
aristocrats whenever we choose. Our people were always 



20 

democratic ; in fact, slavery had that effect in the South, which 
it has had in all countries where one race has held another 
in slavery. The line of demarcation between the slave ard 
the free man was a line so broad and so marked that it vir- 
tually wiped out all other lines of demarcation in society. 

Even now, after the obliteration of slavery, the masiers 
having belonged to one race and the slaves to another, the 
line of cleavage between the races causes all other lin-S of 
demarcation to fall into utter insignificance in the country and 
comparative insignificance in the cities. In enforcement of 
what I said to my Northern friend in the cloak room. I added 
that in my own town I had seen a citizen paint the outside 
and paper the inside walls of a fellow citizen and afterwards 
dine at that fellow-citizen's house, with the Governor of the 
State and the Bishop of the Episcopal church, an'l that he 
dined there as the admitted equal of his host and of the guests, 
without condescension of any sort, simply because he was a 
good citizen and had been a good Confederate soldier. Why, 
my friends, ours is the only country in the world :oday where 
a man can cry, "hello!" at the gate of another in the night 
time, have the master of the house meet him at the gate with 
a lantern, and after having satisfied himself, in the light of 
that instrument, of the fact that the new-comer is white and 
clean, invite him to stay all night and to be received by the 
family, without show of condescension, upon a footing of 
perfect courtesy. It is strange to other people, but it is not 
strange to me and you that we receive in that way men who 
have been trudging afoot along the public roads, without ask- 
ing or caring whether they be rich or poor, lawyers, bishops 
or ditchers. All we ask is that the man be white, that he 
be clean and that his behavior be decent. This plain people. 
■ siich as I have described them, being put in uniform, consti- 
tuted what a generous-minded Northern officer has called 
"the incomparable infantry of Northern Virginia, with bare 
feet and tattered uniforms, but bright muskets." Well might 
he use the word "incomparable." \Vhat other soldiery in 
the history of the world, viewed solely in the cold, historical 
light of actual accomplishment, has been comparable to it? 
Our ancestors — those "embattled farmers of the American 
Revolution" — whose shots were heard around the world, 
fouerht bravclv and under all circumstances well, Init America 



\ had at that time a population of 3.000,000 of people and, as 
is the case with all new and pioneer countries, a greater pro- 
portion of the population consisted of men of military age 
than is usual. Our forefathers were separated from their ene- 
mies by three thousand miles of ocean. Even in modern 
days, with immense leviathans of the deep, and with steam 
poWer to propel them, we know from the recent experiences 
of America in Cuba and in the Philippines and of Great Britr 
ain in South Africa, the difficulties and slowness of ocean 
transportion of men and materials of war. It is doubtful if 
Great Britain, during any one year of the Revolutionary War, 
ever had upon the American Continent forces in all superior 
to all those of the Colonies, though concentrated in superior 
numbers at given points. It is a known fact that the militia 
of some of the Middle States especially were frequently not 
to be relied upon when facing British regulars in the open. 
The South possessed a population of about 7,000,000 white 
people. It faced in war about 22,000,000 of people north of 
the Ohio and Potomac, including all the regular army of the 
United States. Back of the 22,000,000 lay this same Atlantic 
Ocean, across which could be ferried, with not as great diffi- 
culty as during the period of the Revolution, the hordes of 
those who were willing to fight us "for pay and provant," or 
for what they thought the cause of liberty. No ocean sep- 
arated us from our native enemy. In the very first great 
battle of the war our comparatively undisciplined levies faced 
the soldiers of the regular army of the United States, without 
fear or quivering, unprotected by entrenchments and upon 
a ground of equality. The forces of the North during the 
entire struggle, in garrison, on the field, in all sorts of duty, 
numbered about 2,000,000; those of the South approximated 
600,000. Whether these figures, which have been disputed in 
their detail, be strictly accurate or not, they are approximately 
so. The great fact remains that except perhaps during the 
first three or four months of the war, we were always stu- 
pendously and unprecedentedly outnumbered — not only out- 
numbered in men, but overbalanced in materials of war, equip- 
ment, hospital provisions, manufacturing energy and capac- 
ity and absolutely overwhelmed in sea power to the point of 
a close blockade of all our ports. There are those who would 
venture to compare the troops of the Boers in South Africa 



22 

with the soldiers of the Confederacy. In many respects they 
were aHke, and actuated by similar motives — pride of race 
and racial courage, engendered by the environment of vast 
numbers of the same inferior race, and a love of individual 
independence. But the Boer was separated from his enemy 
by a broader expanse than the Atlantic even. He began the 
war with superior equipment, superior artillery, and superior 
numbers in the field, and maintained this superiority until 
Great Britain could land naval guns and transport across the 
sea the forces necessary to redress the balance. England 
sent to South Africa about 200.000, some say 250,000 men. 
More than one-half of these were required to hold the lines 
of communication, not only within and along the borders of 
the hostile States, but even in Cape Colony itself, where a 
majority of the population is Dutch, and w^s either secretly 
or openly hostile, necessitating garrisons for the purpose of 
holding down and preventing the outburst of hostile senti- 
ment in her own colony. The Boers themselves boasted that 
with their troops and foreign legionaries and the Cape Colony 
Dutch, who had joined them, they put into the field all told 
at the very beginning 70,000 soldiers. These soldiers were 
for the most part well and long disciplined, acquainted with 
the difficult country in which field operations must be car- 
ried on, themselves acclimated and riding acclimated horses, 
with the most magnificent equipment of the most efficient long 
range artillery any equal force had ever had. The Confed- 
eracy waged a war for four years, waged it with organized 
armies up to the very day of Kirby Smith's surrender. The 
Boer war lasted only about two years, and during a third of 
that time was not a war of organized armies, but of parti- 
san bands. Such battles or skirmishes as they won in the 
open field were during the early period of the war, when 
their forces were equal, nearly equal or superior, and when 
their artillery was so much superior that there was no com- 
parison. No braver soldier ever fired a musket, or by courage 
lifted himself to the end of a forced march than the Boers in 
South Africa, and yet, judged in the cold light of compara- 
tive achievement, they cannot be compared with "the plain 
people of the South in uniform." 

There have been battles in the history of the world when 
the forces were much more disproportionate than were the 



23 

forces of the North and South during- the war between the 
States, but they were battles in which men of the white race 
were arrayed upon one side and Asiatics or Africans upon the 
other. This was the case at Marathon. This was the ease 
in the numerous engagements in which the English and the 
Scotch and the Irish, under Clive and Havelock and Lawrence 
and Nicholson, met East Indians upon the plains of Hindoos- 
tan. We, however, were not only fighting white men, but 
for the most part of our own branch- of the white race, our 
equals in physical stature, in power of endurance, in intellect, 
in discipline ; our superiors in equipment and mechanical in- 
genuity and in resources ; unequal to us only in this, that the 
sentiment wlhich inspired them was not so intense, nor the 
evils to result from defeat so frightful to their imaginations. 
The "plain people in uniform," the private soldiers of the 
Confederacy, were great, because, as I have inadequately in- 
dicated, of their democracy, race pride and environment. But 
in addition to environment there are other things which 
determine the character of a man or of a people. Heredity 
is one, perhaps the chief. The esprit du corps or the general 
body of a people's ideas and ideals, and opinion of themselves 
is another. Speaking of the heredity of the Southern people, 
it must never be forgotten that they belonged almost en- 
tirely to the great English-speaking race, as purely so as 
all the inhabitants of the United States did in colonial days 
and during the Revolution, and that the generation of South- 
ern white people, who fought the war, were the product of 
the inter-breeding of this race for long generations in an at- 
mosphere of freedom and manly self-dependence, engendered 
by a country life. They and their ancestors before them, for 
many gnerations, had lived the open air life of planters and 
farmers. They had been accustomed, as country people of 
comparative leisure always must be, to depend upon them- 
selves alone in sudden emergencies. Riding and shooting 
and taking care of one's self were no arts to be learned. They 
had been learned in infancy from fathers and grandfathers, 
who were masters of them. 

And w^hat was their ideal? It was all that was highest 
and best and bravest and most chivalrous among the acquire- 
ments of the race to which they belonged — the culmination 
of duty and personal honor. It is no wonder then that they 



24 

fou.crht well when we consider the heredity, environment, the 
esprit du corps and the things for which they fought. They 
fought for local self-government. Many had fought before 
them at this soul-stirring call. But they fought for more in 
addition ; for the civilization of the English-speaking branch 
of the Caucasian race. And what a civilization it is, my hear- 
ers ! The wisdom of Egypt, the beauty of Greece, the maj- 
esty of Rome, all these are as nothing in comparison. Speak- 
ing a language the richest and most capable of expression 
which the world has ever known, the civilization of which 
they boasted, the fruit of all the ages of the struggles of the 
race with hard nature and harder men in Europe and in 
America, had been perfected to a degree unprecedented in 
the history of the world, based, as it was and is, upon a code 
of ethics peculiar to themselves in many things. Their law 
was the great body of the common law, which has succeeded, 
more nearly than any other law which ever existed, in "pre- 
scribing what is right and forbidding what is wrong," as be- 
tween man and man and man and State. The race had asserted 
its superiority wherever it had gone, from the borders of the 
Arctic sea to the Equator, in the Occident and in the Orient. 
What a civilization! I say, the civilization of a race which 
alone of all races has refused to hybridize with inferiors, has 
refused to "herd with the narrow foreheads vacant of our 
glorious gains," a civilization which carries freedom for its 
own citizens, and for all others at least these things; law 
and order and peace, wherever it goes — a civilization whose 
prince of knights was Sir Philip Sydney, whose princes in 
statesmanship and empire building were Hampden and Syd- 
ney and Chatham and Jefferson; whose prince of drama was 
William Shakespeare; whose prince of epic poets was John 
Milton; whose prince of philosophers was Sir Francis 
Bacon; whose princes of sweet singers were Moore, Burns 
and Tennyson, and our own Allan Poe ; whose princes of 
scientists were Sir Isaac Newton, Darwin. Huxley, Agassiz 
and Gray ; whose princes of oratory— greater even, several of 
them, than Cicero and but little less great than Demosthenes- 
were the elder Pitt, Charles J. Fox, Patrick Henry, Henry 
Clay, Calhoun. Webster, William C. Preston and our own 
Sargent S. Prentiss; whose historians were Hume and Ma- 
cauley, Prescott and Motley, Buckle and Bancroft; whose 



25 
epoch-making political philosophers were Locke, Adam 
Smith, John Stuart Mill, John C. Calhoun, and, greater than 
all, save perhaps Jefferson, Edmund Burke, whose commerce 
whitened the seas of the world with its sails, whose free insti- 
tutions were an inherited right. 

Men are made great soldiers by what they fight for as 
much as by what they are, and when you old veterans, grow- 
ing daily older in years and fewer in numbers, who are as- 
sembled here today, some of you for the last time, with one 
another, do not imagine that you and those who fought with 
you deserve all of the credit for the magnificent courage, the 
superb fortitude, which you displayed. You showed the 
"mettle of your pasture." You ought to have fought better 
than anybody else. You fought for more than anybody else 
ever did. You had more to fight for. You not only fought 
for the right of local self-government, you fought not only, 
as you thought, for the supremacy of the race and for the 
very life of your civilization itself — a civilization the value 
and splendor, the beauty and glory and holiness of which no 
man may depict — you not only fought for all these, but you 
went forth to fight for them at the bidding of a pure, home- 
keeping womanhood, the very flower and fruit of it all; the 
sweetest, gentlest, purest womanhood that the world has 
ever seen, and too, a womanhood which encouraged to action 
and pointed the finger of scorn at the laggard. Your race, 
your civilization, your women — you fought for all these ; and 
last but not least, for your land. The land itself was and is a 
glorious thing. The land we live in ! The land we love ! 
God sun-kisses the heights and throws shadows upon the 
valleys of no sweeter land in all this world. It is a land to 
live in ; a land to die for. From its northernmost limits, 
where "the beautiful river" winds its way towards its junc- 
tion with the turbid waters of the Mississippi, from where 
the clear Potomac breaks through its mountain passes, to 
rush to its destiny in the bay, down to its southernmost 
limit amongst the everglades of Florida, or where the warm 
waters of the Gulf lave the sands of the Mississippi sea coast; 
from its highest altitude, where the Great Smokies in "the 
Switzerland of America" pierce and overtop the clouds, down 
to its lowest, where the lazy Mississippi, conscious of its 
majesty and of its strength, winds its slow course towards 



26 

tlie Gulf, but little below its own level ; along the grassy- 
slopes of the valleys of Virginia and Tennessee ; in the balmy 
air of the long leaf pines; amidst the fields of opening cotton 
or waving wheat ; where the oaks rear their majestic heads 
or where the magnolias and the orange trees blossom ; every- 
where — all over it — he who lives in a palace and he who lives 
in a hut are alike in one respect; they look out from the 
doors of their homes upon a kindly, genial and beautiful 
land — a land the very sight of which kindles love for itself. 
No wonder, then, that the Southerner loves the South. The 
Georgian loves Georgia, the Alabamian loves Alabama, the 
Mississippian loves Mississippi, the Tennessean loves Ten- 
nessee ; but there is one thing which each loves more yet. and 
that is the South — a land which is not a separate land, a peo- 
ple without a nationality. The Frenchman's love of country 
is noisy, boisterous, self-assertive, and justified with it all; 
the German's ingrained devotion to the Fatherland is philo- 
sophical, historical, wfell-grounded ; the Englishman loves En- 
gland as a man loves his wife ; he has tried her and she has 
always proven true and worthy; but in his love for her, as in 
the love of a nian for his wife, he can see and patiently dis- 
cuss her faults He does do it and loves her in spite of them 
But the Southerner loves the South as a boy does his sweet- 
heart — with all his heart. He will do foolish things for her 
at her mere bidding. He will bear no discussion of her 
faults. She is a consecrated thing — the image of which is 
enshrined in his heart. Her sufferings, her humiliations and 
the criticisms of others only emphasize his devotion or arouse 
his anger. 

The Southern people present the unparalleled spectacle 
to the world of being the only people who, for four years, 
bore upon the points of their bayonets a cause which appar- 
ently they lost, and coming forth from the struggle ruined 
and despairing, came forth at least not discordant. They 
alone of all men under such circumstances have failed and 
refused to make a scapegoat of a single great man in their 
military or civil employ, who led them to the unsuccessful 
issue. They know, whatever the world may think, that it 
was they themselves who led themselves. They have brooked, 
and they and their children will brook, no word of reproach 
of Lee, of Jackson, of the Johnstons, of Hampton, of Stuart. 



27 

and their paladins, nor have they brooked nor will they brook, 
strange as it may seem (for it is easier for men to bear slurs 
upon their civil than upon their military leaders), one word 
of reproach or censure of "The Great Mississippian," who, 
in his person, bore the sufferings of us all, and who lived 
at the conclusion for only one purpose — to draw up and give 
to the world a dispassionate and true account of the cause 
for which you fought and of the manner in which you fought it 
— Jefferson Davis. Remember always that these men who 
have refused to sacrifice unto themselves a scapegoat were 
and are the common people of the land. Once, sitting upon 
the floor of the House of Representatives, paying but scant 
attention to the running debate, there fell upon my ears un- 
expectedly from the lips of a Northern Representative a con- 
temptuous reference to the "poor white trash of the South." 
The remembrance of all they had been, and all that they were, 
was in my heart. I said, as I would say now, and as I would 
have you all say: "We have poor men in the South, as you 
have in Massachusetts, but the poor men are not always, nor 
generally 'trashy.' We have 'trashy' men in the South, as 
you have in New England, but some of the trashiest of them 
are the richest. Except for novelists and for negroes, there 
is not, and there never has been, any such class as 'poor 
white trash.' If you refer under that designation to the poor 
whites of the South, history can tell you that they are the 
most magnificent raw material out of which superb manhood 
and pure womanhood is made— that this world knows or has 
knov/n. They are the only body of so-called 'common people,' 
of whom it may, as a rule, be said that they can neither be 
bought nor can they be scared." I did not say, ladies and 
gentlemen, because I thought it would be then and there in 
bad taste, what I might have said in addition. I might have 
said that if the poor people of the white race in the South 
are to be designated as "poor white trash," the gentleman 
himself and all Northern men might find cause for serious re- 
flection. If there was a class in the South to whom the appli- 
cation might have been applied, it ^^as the class from which 
Abraham Lincoln sprang— the poorest of the poor— and the 
thriftless poor, at that. Bone of our bone and sinew of our 
sinew, he received from a Southern ancestry on both sides— 
and especially upon his mother's side— his patient courage. 



28 

his imperturbable perseverance, his loyalty to his ideals, and 
above all, the characteristic common sense and sense of 
humor of the Southerner. I might have told them that they 
got not only the head of their civil government and the chief 
of their land captains from our blood or territory, not only 
Lincoln and Grant and the Rock of Chickamauga — George 
B. Thomas — but that when they wanted a sea captain worthy 
of the Vikings of the race, they got him in the person of 
Farragut, of Tennessee, raised out near Knoxville, amidst 
and one of the class which they contemptuously call "poor 
white trash." I might have gone back in the history of 
our common country and called up, as types of this imagined 
class, Patrick Henry, Henry Clay — the "mill boy of the 
slashes" — and Andrew Jackson, the "hero of New Orleans." 
Whether rich or whether poor, the yeomanry of the South — 
its "peasantry," if one chooses to indulge in a word derived 
from European conditions — has been, and is now, great in 
peace and in war. Great because they have always been, 
and are now, devotees of individual freedom and of exact 
equality, above the color line, in society and in the State. 

The same heredity, the same environment, the same 
ideals and aspirations, the same beautiful land and pure 
women, the same devotion to the supremacy of the white 
man's laws, the white man's code of ethics, and his civiliza- 
tion, which sustained us during so many days of "the times 
which tried men's souls," will sustain them still. The same 
race pride is here, a fair substitute for courage with those 
few to whom God has not given the real article. In the 
moments of reflection that accompany the time when you 
shall become conscious of your call to "join the innumerable 
caravans of the dead," let this reflection be your consolation — 
that you fought for no lost cause, but for a cause, the good and 
precious in which has been won : that your children, and their 
children's children, as long as the republic itself shall endure, 
will maintain, in peace or in wtir. the right to local self- 
government, and the sacred heritage of a race's supreme civ- 
ilization. Carry also this thought with you to your last 
resting place — that your inauguration of the great struggle 
may have left some ruins in its wake, but that the very ruins 
themselves are sacred and precious to those who come after 
you, calling to mind a heritage which would probably have 



29 

been lost to us, and to all of those who shall come after us, 
but for your battling and your defeat. Then, too, while 
gaining and preserving our real cause, you lost and failed in 
that which it would have been an incalculable pity had you 
succeeded in — we failed to break up the American Union. 
God alone here knew that we could preserve the cause and 
still save the Union. 



"There are gains in all our losses, 
There are balms in all our pain." 



For- 



I 



"* * * hands of invisible spirits touch the strings 
Of that mysterious instrument — the soul — 
And play the prelude of our fate." 

This sentiment, wfhich some people say is "rot," is the 
heritage which came with disaster and with many ruins. As 
a great orator has said : ''A land without ruins is a land 
without memories, a land without memories is a land without 
history," and, as I like to add, a land without history is a 
land without sentiment, a land without sentiment is a land 
without aspiration, and a land without aspiration is a land 
without purpose, and a land without purpose is a land devoid 
of noble daring or high achievement. Or, as Father Ryan 
\as better expressed it, taking the words of the orator, whom 
I have quoted, as his text : 

"Yes! give me the land where the ruins are spread, 
And the living tread light on the hearts of the dead; 
Yes! give me a land that is blessed by the dust, 
And bright with the deeds of the down-trodden just. 
Yes! give me the land where the battle's red blast 
Has flashed to the future the fame of the past; 
Yes! give me the land that hath legends and lays, 
That tell of the memory of long vanished days; 
Yes! give me a land that hath story and song, 
Enshrining the strife of the right and the wrong; 
Yes! give me a land with a grave in each spot. 
And the names in the graves that shall not be forgot; 
Yes! -give me the land of the wreck and the tomb, 
There is grandeur in graves — there is glory in gloom; 
For out of the gloom future brightness is born. 
And after the night comes the sunrise of morn; 
And the graves of the dead with grass overgrown 
May yet form the footstool of Liberty's throne, 
And each single wreck in the war-path of might 
Shall yet be a rock in the temple of right." 

The Confederacy had its poets, as it had its land captains, 
and its sea captains — Timrod and Hayne and Thompson — 
but he who came nearest touching the very heart of the 



30 

people, who was par excellence, the "Poet of the Confederacy," 
was Father Ryan. I am going- to read you a few lines which 
he published soon after the War, and which accorded more 
nearly with the feelings of the people at that time than any- 
thing which even he wrote, and I want you to analyze your 
own feelings now and see if you feel as you did then. It was 
written at a time when despair ruled supreme in the hearts 
of men surrounded by the destruction of the land and the 
humiliations accompanying its attempted so-called "recon- 
struction." At that time the cause seemed verily a lost cause. 
There were but few(, if any, who dared dream that out of its 
seeming defeat in war was to come its victory in peace, by 
an organization of masterly inactivity, so long as inactivity 
was the watchword, and masterly inactivity, when the time 
for activity had come. All about your beautiful city, every 
Decoration day, are little Confederate flags in the hands of 
•children, who are disobeying the injunction of this poem, an 
injunction which we then thought wise as well as beautiful. As 
I read think why we think it is well today to disobey his in- 
junction : 

"Furl that banner, for 'tis weary, 
'Round its staff 'tis drooping dreary; 

Furl it, fold it, it is best; 
For there's not a hand to wave it. 
And there's not a sword to save it. 
And there's not left to lave it. 
In the blood which heroes gave it. 
And its foes now scorn and brave it; 
Furl it, hide it — let it rest!" 

"Furl it, hide it, let it rest!" Is that the way you and I 
feel about it now? Do we feel that unfurling it is but the 
reorganization of a useless struggle in behalf of a "lost cause?" 
Do "its foes now scorn and brave it?" "Brave it," aye! If 
it were held out to be braved, but it is not. "Scorn it?" No! 
There is not one man, North or South, native or foreign, 
that dares say he scorns that flag, or the struggle whose 
emblem it was. He would lie in his throat, and every man 
living, friend or foe, would know that he had lied. It made 
itself respected, whatever else it did. But yesterday, with a 
President in the White House who bore the Stars and Stripes 
successfully until the Southern cross fell, there is no prouder 
boast made bv his friends than that the men who bore the 



31 

Stars and Bars of the Confederacy are among- the worthiest 
of those who now bear the .flag of their forefathers. Let 
me read further : 

Furl it, for the hands that grasped it, 

Cold and dead are lying low; 
While around it sounds the wailing 

Of its people in their woe." 

"While around it sounds the wailing of its people in their 
woe." Is that true now? On the contrary, around it sounds the 
shouting of its people in their joy — joy because they are liv- 
ing in a state of things where all that was essential in the 
cause of right still lives, and all that was non-essential and 
mistaken has disappeared, not only from our conditions, but 
from our hearts. It is the shouting of its people in their tri- 
umph which greets me today. A dissenter in England, who 
believes in the rule of a free Parliament and in Puritanism, 
might as well speak of the banner which Cromwell carried 
as one around which "sounds the wailing of its people in 
their woe." He knows, as does all the world, that there, too, 
was yet another so-called "lost cause," which was not lost, 
because the right that W'^s in it had triumphed. In connec- 
tion with lost causes generally, I am reminded of the words of 
Tennyson : 

"And I doubt not through the ages. 

One increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men are broadened 

With the progress of the suns." 

Yet further, let me read: 

"Furl that banner, softly slowly. 
Treat it gently — it is holy — 

For it droops above the dead. 
Touch it not, unfold it never. 
Let it droop there, furled forever, 

For its people's hopes are dead!" 

Are its people's hopes dead? Not a whit of it. We are 
not "at the dawn of a 'new day' for the New South," as 
many say, but the old Southern day is growing brighter 
and more beautiful, as the sun of its people's hopes rises 
higher and higher. 

"Touch it not, unfold it never, 
Let it droop there, furled forever." 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




32 Kj| 014 441 058 0^ 



Shall we "let it droop there, furled forever?'' In the name 
of all that is true and brave, we answer, no! Once a year in 
the resurrection season of nature, we shall unfurl it, unfurl it 
as a symbol of the cause which it represented, and still rep- 
resents, as the symbol of the solidity of its people in behalf 
of local self-government and in behalf of the perpetuation 
of the supremacy of the white man's ethics, his law, the prec- 
ious fruits of his literary and industrial attainment — in a 
word, his civilization. We shall unfurl it as a symbol of the 
resurrection in our hearts of the memories of the cause and 
of the men who bore it. We shall place it in the hands of 
little children, that it may symbolize in their hands the per- 
petuation of the annual resurrection of those memories to 
our children, and to their children's children, as long as time 
shall last. It is the symbol today of something grander even 
than the immortality of the individual, to-wit: The immor- 
tality of the race, its culture, its ideals and that body of ac- 
quired sentiment which we call civilization. We should un- 
furl it in these annual celebrations, in the anniversary month 
of Appomatox, for another reason, because — 

"* * * Its fame on brightest pages. 
Penned by poets and bj' sages, 
Shall go sounding down the ages." 

Now, my friends, I have spent over an hour in trying to 
"utter the thoughts that arise in me." and yet I might have 
uttered them better in a much shorter time, without weary- 
ing your patience, had I quoted the words, rising to a climax, 
of one verse of that great poem which every Southern child 
should learn by heart, "The Sword of Robert E. Lee," written 
by this same "Priest-Poet" of the Confederacy, from whom 
I have read. Speaking of the sword of Lee, the very flash- 
light of the cause, as its wearer was the very type of the men 
di the sixties, he says : 

"******** Never hand 

Waved sword from strain as free, 
Nor purer sword led braver band, 
Nor braver bled for a brighter land. 
Nor brighter land had a cause so grand; 

Nor cause a chief like Lee!" 



